


Find Someone Who's Turning

by Morbane



Category: Galax-Arena Series - Gillian Rubinstein
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Names
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-15 05:53:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7210598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Presh knows, very well, the value of attachments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Find Someone Who's Turning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dolorosa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dolorosa/gifts).



Love is transactional. Wai Chan's mother teaches her this. 

Not directly, with either actions or words. Neither treats, nor praise, nor attention have much to do with Wai's behaviour. Treats are scarce, and sometimes come all at once, when Wai's mother has a good week. Her mother's attention is scarcer, but keener. When Wai's mother says that she's sorry she'll be home late, or wishes she could have come to the school sports day, Wai believes her. And her mother praises her, but often, the things Wai is proudest of, her mother isn't around to see. Often, what Wai's mother praises her for is _not_ doing something, like being untidy or loud. Wai only sees part of her mother, and her mother only sees part of her, like the Venn diagrams she learns at school, or like two hoops rolling past each other, out of alignment so that the gap they share is too narrow to allow Wai to jump through both at the same time.

Wai learns the phrases _falling in love_ and _leap of faith_ long after she has learned how to catch herself from falling, how to land from leaping, and how to keep up her guard.

Wai learns about her mother's choices and their compensations from hearing her mother talk with other women about the men who pay them. She isn't supposed to. She's usually not even in the room - perhaps in the next one, or in the hall, or just up the stairs. But being quiet and tidy is useful for its own sake. Her mother never forgets that she might be there - _never_ \- but sometimes one of the other women does, and leads the conversation's volume up. She learns from the glimpses she gets of her mother with clients (sometimes her mother can't find a sitter, and she does her homework late at night in a little glorified closet behind the bar). 

She learns that love may be infinite, but there's only so much of a person to go around. She learns that sometimes her mother's clients want more of her than they are paying for, and that at other times, money and interest dry up at the same time. She hears her mother say that a client is just a client, but sometimes she sees her mother sad, hurt by rejection after all. She learns that love is a currency, and she promises herself that she will never give it away without asking what she will get in return.

And she never finds out if what her mother teaches her about love is what she would have wanted Wai to learn, because she's only a child, really, when Hythe takes her to the Galax-Arena.

* * *

In the Galax-Arena, no one has mothers, and no one is a child.

There is no Wai, either. 

Hythe, their procurer (she never says it out loud, but she lets it show in her eyes that she thinks of him as a pimp) uses his wrist-weapon on her before he sets her loose among the other _peb_. That first time, she recoils from the shock of simultaneously being in pain, and _not being_ the person in pain, and finds in the experience something she can use. She is not Wai. Wai belongs to the world she was born in, where she is safe. Wai does not belong here, or to these people. And yet she is here, and she is owned - but it is not so bad that she is treated as less than a person, if she imagines that they do not, indeed, have all of her. 

Hythe smirks when she refuses to give the _peb_ a name. Hythe, she sees, is pleased to have another thing to hold over her. He could give the _peb_ the name she withholds, if he wants to. But she behaves, she dances and dives, she takes a place among the _peb_ ; she doesn't give him a reason to want to, and by the time it occurs to him to do it for spite, to stir things up, instead of simply to punish her, she has another name.

* * *

Some of the _peb_ tell stories about their lives before the Galax-Arena; many prefer not to. But she is the only one with no name and no story at all.

Some of the _peb_ avoid her for this reason.

The boy called Allan offers fight rather than flight. He needles her, bumps into her while she is training, and openly mocks the other _peb_ who work with her. It isn't enough for him that she doesn't act to cause trouble. By merely existing in a way that he doesn't like, she is a threat to him.

She doesn't like him - she doesn't like any of them - but she has to notice him. He's her opposite in every way. She has left a part of herself behind in order to survive here: she thinks Allan would not survive if Hythe could strip from him all of the parts of his life that he has kept here. His name, which he was born with. His friend, Ashmaq, who was his friend before they came here. And the stories the two of them share. 

It's obvious that all these things give him his recklessness, on _los altos_ and among the _peb_ , and also give him resilience. He thinks he matters in a way that has nothing to do with the _peb_ and how he flies or falls. He doesn't understand why _she_ thinks she matters, when she has none of these things.

But she does matter, and they both know it. That knowledge is the first thing they share.

The insults he lets fly at her don't stick, because she can hold her own in the arena. The other _peb_ , except Ashmaq, don't join in when he attacks her. She lets him see that the words have less interest for her than the ribbon that she spins and flicks around her as she moves. She doesn't react to the taunts, except with occasional, brief scorn.

Scorn is her best defense, but taunts are not _his_ only weapon. He names her at last on a night when she has danced out beyond herself, left even her reserve behind. When the lights dim at the end of the performance she is still flying. Joy makes you vulnerable too.

"Wasn't she brilliant," Allan says, mock-admiring. Unlike her, he rarely bothers with patwa; like Hythe, he likes to think that either the other _peb_ will work to understand him, or they'll wish they had.

"Dis be verdad!" little Fenja agrees, her eyes worshipful. 

"Brilliant," Allan says again, trying out words as though none are quite good enough for her. "Wonderful. Awesome. Precious." His eyes light up.

"Precious Flower," he declares. "Dat be yo name!"

"Presh," Ashmaq drawls, beside him, turning it into something grudging.

"Presh!" Rashika takes it up. They are crowning her with a name.

Allan's expression is triumphant. He has given her something that is no gift at all.

* * *

But it is Allan who seems to first forget that. 

It is only a few _manyan_ later, only a few _noch_ , that he addresses her as Presh with a tone that suggests they are friends, or that they share secrets. It is as if he thinks that pinning a name on her was a true gift. She thinks he likes the idea of her owing him something; he likes the idea of having a claim on her. These are attractive enough ideas that he begins to like her along with them. 

The girl who was Wai Chan is familiar with gifts that are traps, and gifts meant to buy a person. The girl who is no one remembers. And yet, even if 'Presh' is only another word for 'no one' - even if none of the other _peb_ admit this - it is easier to be Presh. Allan is not the only _peb_ to see her anew, with her new name.

Her name is Allan's idea. She imagines letting Presh be all Allan's ideas: a _peb_ who begins and ends with him. It would be another way of disappearing, of hiding the real person who is caged here. He wants to hold her. She would take shape within his arms the way some of the peb curl up under Hythe's touch, like withering leaves.

But she doesn't, and that is because Allan has nothing to give her that is worth returning his obsession, or fitting into the place he has created for her in his world. Allan has Ashmaq, who will always be more to him than she can be. And his world isn't really his, but Hythe's.

* * *

When that changes - when Ashmaq falls, and Hythe's authority is challenged - when Allan and Peter realise that they are competing not just for the top place within the arena, but for leadership of the _peb_ \- she goes to him. 

His need of her is something that remains when other things have been taken from him, and it has become something she can use - and choose.If he has given her something by naming her, by watching her, and by deciding that she matters to him, then he must be the poorer for it: he has increased only in needs. She knows how to account these things. If his gift was a burden, then she has failed to reject it: the girl who was no one might have survived without attachments, but Presh will not survive here if Allan succumbs.

They have so little, here, to bargain with, for either status or survival. When love is a currency, it is no small thing to be needed. If she does not reach for him, and him for her, they both may fall.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Neil Young song, 'Don't Let It Bring You Down':  
>  _Don't let it bring you down_  
>  _It's only castles burning_  
>  _Find someone who's turning_  
>  _And you will come around_


End file.
